Indoor

How to spell indoor

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce indoor

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does indoor mean?

1. adjectiveSituated in, done within, or designed for use inside a building.

Indoor in a sentence

• The hotel has a heated indoor swimming pool open all year.

• On rainy days the children prefer indoor games like cards and puzzles.

Where does indoor come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English compound, formed from the preposition 'in' and the noun 'door', both of which trace back to Old English and the broader Germanic family; the Old English form was 'duru', a relative of the German 'Tür' and the Dutch 'deur'. The phrase 'within doors' was used from the 1500s to mean inside a house, with 'door' standing in for the whole dwelling, much as we still speak of 'next door'. By the early 1700s the contracted adverb 'indoors' had appeared, and the adjective 'indoor' followed shortly after as writers needed a word to describe things belonging inside, such as indoor servants or indoor games. The spelling keeps both o's of 'door' intact, which is the small trap: it is one word with a double o, not 'indor' or a hyphenated 'in-door'. Its everyday partner 'outdoor' was built on exactly the same pattern.

How the word is built

• in- (inside)
• door (a building's entrance, used here to mean the building itself)